Bangladesh is a highly densely populated country with an average population density of over 1200 people per square kilometer. Agriculture remains the primary source of nutrition to the country’s population of 166 million, although the economic contribution of agriculture in terms of its share of GDP continues to decline. The agriculture sector has progressed over the past half a century since its independence in 1971, especially in increasing productivity in nearly all subsectors – crops, livestock, poultry, fish, and others. However, the increasingly shrinking availability of productive land, fragmented landholding, and the lack of ample capital assets pose serious challenges to coping with the expanded population and offering sufficient nutrition. In this paper, we would like to examine the trajectory of Bangladesh's agricultural and food production system over the past couple of decades and what role it has been playing in offering nutritional security to the people of Bangladesh. We will also explore the contribution international trade plays in providing nutritional security for the people.   

The specific objectives are:

1.      Identify per capita production of different food crops and examine the trend.

2.      Identify the variability among different food products and their trend

3.      The per capita availability of major nutrition: protein, carbohydrate, fat, etc.

4.      Trends of other health and nutrition variables [i.e., infant mortality, life expectancy, live birth weight, women anemic, etc.,]

5.      Relate agricultural productivity with nutritional security.

6.      Recommend policy options

The raw secondary data for this project has already been downloaded from different sites, especially FAOSTAT, the World Bank Databank, and the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics. Some literature searches and downloading literature have also been done. This was the first phase of the project.

The tasks the students will complete are the following: Identify relevant data, consolidate, and collate those in a usable format (Excel), develop various graphs (line graph, pie-chart, stack-bar, etc.), conduct simple statistical analysis (mean, median, mode, variance, standard deviation, coefficient of variation, etc.), simple correlation and regression analysis. All graphs and tables are to be in a form that can be easily imported to an MS Word file.

I will first explain the entire task to the students, provide the dataset, and sign a confidentiality agreement so that they do not share the dataset with others. I will explain to them how to do what tasks and monitor them on a weekly basis at a minimum. I will ask the students to give me feedback after every task they do, which could be every other day or twice a week, whatever is practicable. At a minimum, we plan to meet physically in my office so that we can go over the progress sitting in front of one computer.